Duskhunt

Struggled back onto schedule for my marking, and as a break, I took a long bike ride down to East Coast Park and waited for the sunset. At Bedok Jetty, there were dozens of people flicking fishing rods into the surrounding waters, and plucking the lines out of the water to reveal small fish, glittering silver as they thrashed on the cement, bewildered and dying in an environment that they must not have ever imagined before. But I don't find it possible myself to feel sorry for fish. In those eyes you don't see any glimmer of intelligence. The only thing is how their scales flash and gleam in the sunlight.

I returned to Bedok Jetty partly because it was a good ways from home, and thus let me have a long ride en route, through the park connectors and landed estates, past a military camp and under an expressway. Partly, though, it is also because here, at Bedok Jetty, I remember. Surrounded by nothing but water and sky, I remember struggling, bewildered and panicked, in a new environment that defied imagination. Here, I remember discovering possibilities that were simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. Here on a terminus of land between the two unfamiliar realms of sea and sky, I glimpsed a promise and a threat; I got an inkling of the enormity of the choices that can face a person, and that you know only that one or both of these choices may entail a liberation or an obligation, but you cannot begin to guess which one is which.

*

Forgive me for waxing lyrical: I just have a feeling that I need to write something, a new story perhaps, but I lack the content to write on. I find that my circumstances now aren't so different from my Army life, in that the experiences that I am going through now are quite hard to relate to someone who hasn't gone through it before himself. Whenever I try, it comes off as sounding condescending or innately superior. I guess it's because I actually like my job very much, and I'm enjoying myself so much that other people either don't believe me, or think it's unfair.

See, even saying that much sounds condescending.

But I do agree that having it totalise my life is unhealthy. There must always be a certain distance that you can fall back on and from which you can maintain your sense of perspective. And today, going on the bike ride was a way to set my perspective straight again. The real world still exists outside, and there are things happening that are irrelevant to whether I finish marking or not. People walk their poodles, go for their weekend jogs, fish at the seaside, photograph sunsets and worry about the next week. And it is comforting to know that whatever I do has limited implications for the world at large. It keeps the paralysis of overwhelming responsibility at bay. Can you imagine if your work has the power to make or break someone's life? How would you be able to complete it?

So getting out, reconnecting, observing, losing oneself is a comfort in this way. It reassures me that the world will not end on my account, nor will it be saved because of me. And that prevents me from putting so much of myself into my work that I get lost in it. And, consequently, the part that I do not put into it makes the part that I do put into it more valuable, more appropriate and more focused, I think.

*

In a similar vein, warmest well-wishes to my people abroad on their impending examinations come with this suggestion: look up at the sky when you feel helpless and paralysed; whatever happens, the world will go on, and in this wide and wonderful world, you can always find a way to go on with it.